A lesson learned.
This year, I decided to reduce the use of plastics in the tomato greenhouse by using ordinary garden string to support the plants, rather than the plastic string I have used in previous years. What I do is to tie the string through the holes I have made in the bottom of the Morisons Flower Buckets that I grow my plants in and loop them up to supports in the greenhouse. The plants are then wound around the string as they grow with additional strings added to support sideshoots if I’ve missed them and decided to keep them. This (I thought) would give me a number of advantages:
- It would save me finding odd lengths of plastic in the garden compost (created from the emptied pots at the end of the season);
- It would avoid me passing diseases from one year to the next (I thought using the plastic string for more than one year was a “good idea” but I think that the string kept diseases over the winter as it couldn’t be properly cleaned); and
- just reducing plastic use.
However, this morning one of my plants (Summer Cider) collapsed under the weight of fruit.
The problem is that the string has rotted off at the bottom. I thought this wouldn’t be an issue as the plant is would around the string and therefore (or so I thought) the friction between the string and the plant would stop the plant sliding down the string and collapsing.
As you can guess, this is not the case. At first it was fine but, as the weight of the fruit increased, the plant has slid down the string and collapsed.
So, I’ve had to go through all my plants tying the (loose) end of the string at the level with the compost so that it won’t slip up the plant. I’ve tied it around the stem of the plants (which is probably a bad thing) as the only other solution I could think of would be to tie some string around the top of the MFB to tie the support to. THat would involve much more disturbance to the plants and probably cause some to collapse whilst trying to rescue others.
Definitely a lesson learned.
Today we picked the first (almost reasonable) harvest of tomatoes – just under 1 kg of mainly cherry tomatoes of various sorts. Looking at my records for previous years we’re about two weeks late. It will be interesting to see whether the harvest catches up. Some things (potatoes, courgettes) are not too bad but others (carrots, beans) are either late or (in the case of our carrots) complete failures.